I'm still over here using
Cent 3.0.4 (from 2017) with multiple websites broken
(notably logging-in, like on Steam, Twitch or Disqus to name a few).
The color/contrast Cent 3.0.4's theme is great, the look of it is great, and the
GDI rendering is way better than any version of Cent passed this point. Yes, Cent still has an option to disable directwrite, but it changed after 3.0.4, and that change was for the worse. Here's a comparison of my current Vivalid version, the latest Cent, and 3.0.4:
https://i.imgur.com/UP9pyys.png
The downgrade in later Cent should be obvious even without labeling due to the aberration artifacting. If you're confused, they're displayed in the order I listed them above.
I'm also on Windows 10
v1703 because newer versions of the OS (well, beyond 1803) change the look of Explorer (to support dark mode) and how Windows handles dark/light mode between system/apps. There's no way to get explorer to be as it was pre-1803 without setting the system to 'light mode', which changes all the Metro/Modern UI to light mode, whereas before it would be in dark mode. The font also renders better, both on desktop, and in programs (and I've changed most things to "
Microsoft Sans Serif" like in Windows XP). For some reason the font in some programs (like Cent) changes after v1703. I've never been able to find out a way to revert any of the UI (beyond changing system fonts) back to how it functioned pre-1809, short of making a custom WindowsBlinds theme which I have no hope of doing. I do not need to run third party programs to get pleasing font rendering in non-material/metro/modern/whatever UI programs in v1703.
I've just read over later portions of the thread from late 2020 to now and I'll try to compile what people have talked about and add my own two cents into the mix.
Catsxp is what people are saying to use as a replacement browser now that it has the ability to disable DirectWrite in the latest version. Unfortunately, it also seems to have mixed opinions on the security of the program and no real validity testing has been done on it. Every single release of it includes
"Some problems correction and detail optimization", there are never any more details about the updates. I really don't like that.
As for
Cent, there's also a post made
here stating the last secure version of Cent was 4.0.9. No validity.
GDIChromium seems to be a successful attempt to add GDI rendering back into native Chrome, but is built for a specific Chromium version. It also seems to require
MacType to work properly (untested).
Personally, I've been forced to use
Vivaldi AND
Firefox alongside my old Cent version for complete coverage of websites. Vivaldi is a great power user browser, but the development is hit or miss. I stopped updating it when they
changed how the tab dragging feature worked to some god awful box select thing (v3.7). It also has (or had) no translation feature and didn't support any DRM-enabled players like on Netflix or Amazon Video until December 2020. And now because of their API changes, sync stopped working on older versions.
It has no GDI rendering, so I only use it for broken websites.
Firefox supported the DRM stuff, and still seems to have its good old advanced config menu
with GDI rendering options, but the UI is drastically different from old versions
(just like what Chome changed into after v70). I can't seem to get font rendering looking like how ye old Firefox (Pale Moon 26.5) did either. It also has an issue where the
address bar is not focused upon startup of the browser like in Chrome. That one single thing invalidates it as a daily driver browser for me, because I expect this behavior and not having it stops my brain in its tracks. So again, I only use it for things that don't work properly in either Vivaldi or Cent.
At the end of the day, I'm only comfortable looking at text on Cent 3.0.4. There's probably numerous third party solutions I just haven't stumbled across for fixing browsers and font rendering and UI design on later Windows, but until I see them, I'll never know about them, so I'm stuck with half broken software!
As it stands right now, part of me really just wants to update to the last non-material design version of Chrome and hope things stay working for a few more years. It's all so tiring. Why developers around the world keep fixing what isn't broken is beyond me.
